Session Results Could Determine Re-election Odds

Though the next full round of statewide elections is more than two years away, how do Governor John Bel Edwards’ chances for re-election look?

“I would say about 50-50,” pollster John Couvillon of JMC Analytics told the Baton Rouge Press Club Monday.

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“Even though he has the benefits of incumbency, it’s also becoming very tough to be a Democrat in Louisiana.”

Overall, Couvillon believes Edwards “broke even” with voters during a difficult first year in office.

“He got a very good bump from last year’s flooding and demonstrations here in Baton Rouge because he gave off an aura of being in command.”

Couvillon says though he’s had to battle the legislature over the budget, the governor hasn’t lost citizen support on that front, so far.

“To me, it’s kind of natural political physics that anybody who started off a term with the budget in as deep of a hole as it was, it can’t get any worse than it’s been. His challenge is, he’s certainly not had a honeymoon. He needs some big wins.”

And with a legislative agenda this year that includes criminal justice reform and an overhaul of the state tax system, the governor could achieve those needed wins.

“If he can get a gas tax passed and/or find a way to more adequately fund the roads, I think he would get a lot of gratitude from voters here,” Couvillon says, by way of an example.

This session could also make or break 2019 re-election chances for lawmakers, since it’s their one chance to fix the $1.2-billion fiscal cliff they created for 2018, when they enacted temporary taxes last year.

“No legislator would want to be responsible for a fiscal Armageddon like that, when the easiest thing to do is just to vote to renew them.”

Of course, challengers could use those tax renewals against incumbent legislators, just as they could use the devastation of failing to put the state’s fiscal affairs in order. Either way, challengers and voters will be watching.

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How did Louisiana end up with the world’s highest incarceration rate? Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre says it grew out of the late 1980’s national political emphasis on “law and order.”

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“The prison population grew exponentially and it became, quite candidly, a cottage industry/prison industrial complex of housing people that were sentenced to jail,” Webre explains. “And the Louisiana legislature passed laws that the judges enforced.”

“It wasn’t easy, having to come back in society, with having to adjust myself to the real world after spending 35 years in prison.”

Reginald is in his 60s, and was sentenced to 121 years for armed robbery and attempted murder. Now, he’s out on parole, participating in an intensive reentry program through what’s known as a “day reporting center”.

Louisiana’s business and industry community says it’s supporting the efforts to reform the state’s criminal justice system.

“If we can get more people into that workforce somehow, devising those ways to move them from where they aren’t being productive to where they can be productive, it too is part of the big issue in terms of the budget,” Mike Olivier with the Committee of 100 says.